There are plenty of valid grounds for criticising Australia's
skilled migration policies. I have often referred to the negative impact of
importing skilled labour for free rather than producing it here. The policy
tweeks designed to "ensure" that employers maintain a commitment to training
local workers are woefully inadequate, in my view. The long-term effect of
creating a workforce in which the higher status, higher paid positions are held
by foreigners while the local population is denied training opportunities
worries me a lot. Heretically, I have even gone so far as to suggest we should
look at importing low skilled domestic and hospitality workers rather than
tradespeople and IT professionals, whom we should be training here.

But
what we are hearing now from the likes of Paul Howes and others is uninformed
demagoguery. Reinhart's 1700 construction workers are not taking the Qantas
employees' jobs. The mining boom, providing the government has the guts to stand
up to its bullying and tax it properly, is the best hope we have of finding the
money to repair the damage done to our education and vocational training
programs over the past two decades of neglect. Otherwise our young people may
soon be packing off to China to look for work as kitchen hands.